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Tens of thousands of protesters marched through Mexico City on July 7th chanting "Fraud! Fraud! Fraud" Photo by N. Parish Flannery @LatAmLENS

One week after Mexico's July 1st 2012 election, tens of thousands protesters marched together through Mexico City, chanting, yelling, and denouncing the return of the PRI, a party that ruled the country as a pseudo autocracy for 71 years before being pushed from office in 2000. Enrique Peña Nieto, the PRI’s candidate, won the election, but has also attracted negative attention from urban, educated protesters.

Omar Rodriguez, a 26 year old with a degree in psychology who studied at UNAM, Mexico’s largest public university, held up a sign that said “Mexico voted, Peña Didn’t Win.”

Rodriguez, wearing RayBan sunglasses, explained his belief that Mexico’s business elite, the same group that had supported right of center governments for the previous twelve years, now supported the PRI, and had helped Peña Nieto win. “They had to buy out the IFE,” Rodriguez said, referencing the country’s Federal Election Institute, Mexico’s electoral oversight body.

The crowd jostled and pushed, walking towards the Zocalo, the main plaza in Mexico City’s center. En masse the protesters chanted “no more fraud!!!” One sign, held up high over the heads in the crowd, called the IFE, the “Electoral Fraud Institute.”

Despite the protests, IFE has confirmed that Peña Nieto received 38% of the vote. His rival, leftist politician Andres Manuel Lopez Obredor, garnered 31% of the vote. The allegations that hundreds of votes that were allegedly bought and that thousands of ballots were miscounted, do not erase the millions of votes that separate Peña Nieto from Obredor.

Fernando Dworak, a Mexico City based political analyst, told me later that “on election day, there was vote buying, [and] all parties participated.”

But, he qualifies “Was it enough to delegitimize or annul the election? No.”

At the march, I met up with one of my friends, a diplomat from Europe who acted as an international observer during the election. He explained “the fraud was not in the vote.” Behind him, a band of young men with spikey hair and black clothing waved flags emblazoned with the logo of the anarchist movement.

“Fraud! Fraud! Fraud!” the crowd yelled.

My friend, who identifies himself as a supporter of AMLO and asked that I not include his name in this article because he was not authorized to speak on the topic, visited voting booths in Peña Nieto’s home state, on election day. He says he saw a number of “irregularities” but no evidence of massive electoral fraud. After the election, he reviewed the vote tallies at the stations he visited and also analyzed records from other parts of the country. “I don’t believe it was fraud, I believe it was human error,” he said, of the problems he saw relating to vote tallies. “There was no systemic fraud,” he said.